Electronic Arts has made the decision to lay off some of its employees, and rumors are that hundreds of EA team members have been affected. Meanwhile, the company is reportedly closing the division that was in charge of publishing third party games.

EA's official statement says simply that it has made "some difficult decisions to reduce the workforce in some locations." Polygon reports, via unnamed sources, that the layoffs are affecting nearly all parts of the large game publishing company, which until today had about 9,000 employees. At least two internal game development studios, PopCap Vancouver and Quicklime Studio, have shut down completely.

Game Informer is also reporting that EA will close EA Partners, which was in charge of publishing games made by developers outside of the company that were not EA properties. Those games included Valve's The Orange Box, the games in Crytek's Crysis series, Double Fine's Brutal Legend and others. EA will still publish two games that were under the EA Partners label; Insomniac Games' third person shooter Fuse and the still unannounced game from Respawn Entertainment, made up of former members of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare team at Infinity Ward.

Hate to be blunt, but it had to happen. EA was bleeding money and it had to cut costs; unfortunately it came at the expense of people's jobs. I'm kind of curious if the EA Partners label wasn't successful for them, however, as they published some pretty well-known third-party games.

Hate to be blunt, but it had to happen. EA was bleeding money and it had to cut costs; unfortunately it came at the expense of people's jobs. I'm kind of curious if the EA Partners label wasn't successful for them, however, as they published some pretty well-known third-party games.

Over the last ten years? Yeah. Recent finances are pretty good though from what I saw.

They probably just need to hire more people for next gen console development, so cut some dead weight.